Amelia Earhart (38 page)

B
y the beginning of 1937 Amelia’s fate was locked into the world flight. Her old friend, Hilton Railey, described her as being “
caught up in the ‘hero stream’ of fliers, compelled to strive for bigger and braver feats necessary to the maintenance of her position as the foremost woman pilot in the world.” She was going to make this most dangerous flight of her life in her first two-engine plane, a powerful, complicated aircraft loaded with special equipment, in which she had had very little flight experience. Yet in the ten weeks remaining she spent most of her time earthbound.

Her lack of flight time worried Paul
Mantz. When he suggested she make a quick trip with him to New York and back in the Electra, she refused. Instead she made a series of short trips out of Burbank with Mantz demonstrating procedures to her, but he was not the best of teachers for an emancipated woman. Mantz used expressions like “Listen to Papa,” and he once called Amelia a good pilot but “a woman’s pilot,” who tended, like many old-timer women pilots, to “jockey the throttles.”

In late February she had a second instructor, Clarence “Kelly”
Johnson, the Electra’s designer. While Mantz tended to patronize her, Johnson taught her as he would any new Electra pilot. He accompanied her as flight engineer rather than copilot while they flew the big plane at
various weights, altitudes, and engine power settings. He also taught her how to use the Cambridge analyzer, setting the fuel mixture control for maximum mileage. Johnson thought she was a good pilot—sensible, studious, and attentive.

However, Amelia was a part-time student distracted by too many extracurricular activities, some obligatory, many voluntary. There were details for the flight route that G. P. could not clean up. When he told her that work on the runway at Howland Island had not begun because the Bureau of the Budget would not authorize funds for it, Amelia wired Franklin Roosevelt for help. Three days after this second request for FDR’s
assistance, she was notified by his aide, Marvin McIntyre, that the money had been allocated to the WPA by order of the president.

There was the new house in Hollywood. With G. P. in New York Amelia was left to supervise work on it. Built on two lots alongside the Toluca Lake golf course, it incorporated the original small bungalow and a new, larger addition with a double study, master bedroom, guest room, and staff quarters.

Amelia hired a staff for it, including a houseman and gardener, Fred Tomas, a housekeeper, Mrs. DeCarie, and a secretary, DeCarie’s daughter, Margot. Young and inexperienced when Amelia hired her,
Margot DeCarie worshipped her employer. “I was spoiled working for A. E.,” she said. “She … thought I could conquer the world and I felt I could too.” Amelia was her hero-saint, a woman who spoke often and freely about anyone she liked but said nothing at all about those she did not. At first G. P. was approved of by DeCarie simply because Amelia, who never made a mistake, married him. Later DeCarie changed her mind, calling him “egotistical and selfish,” a publicity-seeker with no regard for others.

The house at Toluca Lake was where Amelia intended to live on her return. If she gave an
interview in February about another—the one in Rye—to
Better Homes and Gardens
, it was for G. P.’s sake, perhaps to help him find a renter when they needed money so desperately. The
California house was also where she intended her mother to live, in a special room designed to accommodate Amy’s favorite pieces of furniture, a place in which she would be neither underfoot nor isolated.

When the new wing neared completion in late February, Amelia told her mother to find a temporary room in Boston and send on all but
her necessary belongings. She was
not
, Amelia said, to keep
Muriel’s children with her. This admonition resulted from Muriel’s decision to divorce Albert Morrissey, a move that received Amelia’s wholehearted support.

In a long letter dated January 31, Amelia gave Muriel specific advice. She was to transfer one thousand dollars in stock, given her by Amy and held by G. P. but in Albert’s name, to G. P. She was to ask Albert for the five hundred dollars Muriel had given him in a separate transaction. A week later Amelia wired her mother that she was leaving for New York on February 8 and would see Muriel while she was there. Fearing a crisis in which Muriel would not have the address of the lawyer she had recommended, Amelia said to get it from G. P. A legal separation would be necessary, she thought, to insure an income for the children, and Muriel might have to remain in Boston until it was arranged. Under no circumstances, Amelia told Amy, was Muriel to leave the house before Albert.
^*

The apparently happily married woman who knew so much about divorce proceedings had already missed celebrating her sixth wedding anniversary on February 7. She was further delayed by mechanical difficulties with the Electra but arrived in New York on February 11, in time for the press reception G. P. had arranged at the Barclay Hotel to publicize the world flight. G. P. did not get the
news coverage he wanted. Reporters were tired of G. P.’s promotional schemes. Typical of the stories appearing the next day was one in the
New York Times
, less than a half column on page 25.

Never discouraged for long, G. P. followed up five days later when New York’s feisty mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, appeared with Amelia on the steps of City Hall to wish her bon voyage. In his speech La Guardia insisted her flight would be “in no sense a stunt,” a declaration G. P. might well have written for him. When he accompanied Amelia on her flight back to the coast, G. P. staged one more incident that did receive national coverage by the wire services. Amelia had landed the Electra at Blackwell, Oklahoma, after a propeller went out of synchronization. While it was being repaired she borrowed a car from a local dealer and drove G. P., McKneely, and Harry Manning, who had taken leave to be
her navigator on the world flight, to Ponca City for lunch. Before they left, G. P. contrived to have her
arrested by a local policeman who did so when she drove back through Blackwell. In court Amelia pleaded guilty, telling the judge that she hadn’t seen any signs but supposed she might have been going too fast. The judge, who knew nothing about the joke, regarded her with suspicion. She was from New York but said she was driving a borrowed car. “All the way from New York?” he asked. “No,” she said, “I came in an airplane.” He ruled a fine of $1.00 and $2.50 in costs before the mayor arrived, embarrassed because a famous aviator had been treated so badly in Blackwell. After G. P.’s prank was explained to Amelia, the judge, and the mayor, a banquet was arranged for that evening when a ten-foot key to the city was given to Amelia. In the afternoon three thousand fans turned up at her hotel, where she signed autograph books in the lobby for more than an hour before retreating to her room with the promise that if the remaining books were left at the desk she would sign as many as she could before leaving at five o’clock the next morning.

G. P. added even more commitments to Amelia’s schedule. Faced with a paucity of preflight coverage and a growing need for cash, he reneged on his original promise to Lockheed that news of the flight would be free and available to all. Instead, he made a
deal with the
New York Herald Tribune
. Amelia would write her own account of the trip, sending a dispatch from each major stop along the way, stories that G. P. could later compile for a book to be published after her return. The
Herald Tribune
’s syndicated feature service could sell Amelia’s stories to any client newspaper and Amelia’s friend, Carl Allen, would do extensive preflight features as part of the series.

If G. P. thought Amelia’s friendship with Helen Reid would permit him any advantage in the agreement he was wrong. Amelia was told by a
Herald Tribune
editor to “forget God ever gave her a tongue” until each of her stories was written and dispatched. She was not to carry any photographs for any agency nor to help any organization except the
Herald Tribune
and its representatives, and only after they proved their identity. Reid herself added that only
Tribune
representatives should be granted interviews. G. P. replied that if Amelia refused to talk to newsmen she would look ridiculous.
Where possible
, he wrote, she would not answer questions until she had dispatched her own story, but he could not stop
the Navy and Coast Guard from permitting reporters aboard the three ships assisting in the Pacific flight. The
Herald Tribune
settled for G. P.’s terms.

Putnam also bartered Amelia’s name for goods and services. In a single feature written by Allen for the
Herald Tribune
, benefactors mentioned included Bausch and Lomb (nine pairs of sunglasses and a light meter), Vincent Bendix (a radio direction-finder), Standard Oil (fuel depots and services of their representative, Vicomte Jacques de Sibour), Pan American (for flight plan assistance), and Amelia’s franchised luggage (she would carry one Amelia Earhart overnight case on the flight).

In addition, G. P. tested the Hollywood waters for a
feature film, although Amelia said she would not act in it; he would have to find someone else for the starring role. Lectures and guest appearances were already scheduled for her return. Gimbels had assumed promotion of the six-thousand five hundred cacheted covers Amelia would carry, to be sold at $5.00 each if autographed and $2.50, if not. Even the kitchen of the Toluca Lake bungalow was paid for with Amelia’s name. When she showed the room to Allen she explained that G. P. had arranged for a mailorder house to outfit it. In the exchange, Allen observed, “the firm had permission to tell America’s housewives all about its ‘
Amelia Earhart kitchen.’ ” Amelia, Allen claimed, would never have had the gall to look for the deals G. P. found or created.

The first week of March, while Amelia was still in Hollywood, the Bureau of Air Commerce’s coordinator for the flight,
William T. Miller, arrived in Oakland. Superintendent of airways for the bureau, Miller was the man who had assessed Jarvis, Baker, and Howland islands for possible emergency landing fields in the summer of 1935 on an expedition for which he was cited for bravery and “putting the mission before personal interests.” A pilot and lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, he had already worked on Amelia’s flight arrangements in Washington. Miller was a master of government paperwork and protocol, a man who thought of everything.

He suggested that G. P. write to the secretary of war for permission to use Wheeler Field in Hawaii. He secured orders for a naval aerological officer and two mechanics to be sent to Howland to assist Amelia there, then advised Capt. Kenneth Whiting, commanding officer of the Fleet Air Base at Pearl Harbor, that a run-in cylinder assembly and a full set of spark plugs for the Electra would be sent along with the three men. He
sent strip maps of the Caribbean landing fields and advice on what radio bands Navy and Coast Guard ships transmitted as well as received. He arranged for thirty drums of oil to be shipped by the Coast Guard to Howland and sent a dozen cans of tomato juice to Honolulu with instructions to keep six for Amelia’s flight to Howland and to send on the remainder for the flight from Howland to her next destination, Lae, New Guinea.

As soon as he arrived at Oakland, Miller set up an office at the airport and hired a local woman, Vivian Maatta, to be Amelia’s secretary. Although the twenty-seven-year-old Oakland woman worked most of the time for Miller or G. P., who paid her salary, she soon knew all of the flight team members. Maatta thought Amelia was “
quiet but nice,” much prettier than her pictures, and very energetic. In a new, informal division of labor—a fortunate one for Amelia—Miller had taken over the flight arrangements while G. P. worked on finances. She spent most of her time with Miller, poring over maps and charts at his desk.

Just before Amelia brought the Electra from Burbank to Oakland in early March, she met her old friend Gene Vidal in Los Angeles, where G. P. arranged to have them photographed for the newspapers examining an
emergency signal kite that Jackie Cochran had given Amelia. It was rumored that Vidal, who was on a vacation after resigning as head of the Bureau of Air Commerce, would join Amelia and G. P. in a business venture. Although he would neither confirm nor deny the rumor, he had really stopped in Los Angeles to see Amelia and to talk about the flight because he knew it would please her. His visit gained more publicity for her and on his return to Washington soon after he discussed the flight with reporters. Amelia was capable of making it, he told them, but added with a smile that he doubted she would contribute much to research on “the human element” because, he said, “
what is easy for Amelia might be awfully difficult for the rest of us.”

At Oakland Amelia moved into the airport hotel, where she became the center of attention from a group of students of the Boeing School of Aeronautics who were living at the hotel. Amelia chatted with them every morning at breakfast in the coffee shop and she permitted one of them,
Harkness Davenport from Clyde, Ohio, to take pictures of the interior of the Electra with his new 35mm camera. The morning conversations with Amelia ended abruptly for Davenport and his fellow students when G. P. arrived from Hollywood. “He’d go screaming through the
lobby—the great George Putnam—”
Davenport complained, “and it was ‘out of the way, boys.’ ”

On the day Amelia flew to Oakland there was a message from Air Commerce reminding her that her license would expire on April 15. Two days later she qualified for her
instrument rating. Young Davenport, who had taken his the year before and barely passed, said the inspector who gave it remarked that he hadn’t given it to anyone else so inept since Amelia Earhart, who also barely passed. There is no evidence as to whether she had improved since that previous rating. She didn’t take her
written and radio tests until March 14, a day after she had originally planned to take off. Delayed by bad weather, she took and passed both and the Electra was also certified by Air Commerce for the flight.